In the continuing cat and mouse game that has otherwise earned the reputation of being called the great online copyright war, The Pirate Bay and the IFPI have brought this ongoing battle to the global stage. Although the entertainment industry vs. P2P struggle has taken on global ramifications before, the level of desperation on both sides hasn't been seen since Napster. The fight has finally been brought to the ISP. Whoever can emerge intact will likely help formulate the path of the Internet for many years to come.

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) fired some of the first shots earlier this week in Denmark. One of Denmark's most prominent ISPs, Tele2, was forced by a court decision to block The Pirate Bay from their customers. This met with significant protest from members of the file-sharing community - but nothing earth shattering. The technical sophistication of the block is elementary in nature, which at best provides a speed bump on an otherwise uneventful highway.

The news from The Pirate Bay appears to confirm this suspicion. According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block.

"...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI," the blog post reads. "Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk."

"We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There’s no noticable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after."

The Jesper Bay, a spin off of The Pirate Bay, provides users with detailed instructions on how to bypass the block. Using the OpenDNS option has proven so far to be the most popular method. OpenDNS connects the end user to a global DNS (Domain Name Service) server, instead of the ISP's DNS server. Considering the ISP places the block at the DNS level, OpenDNS provides an excellent course to avoid Internet filters.

The lesson learned here is that even with ISP filtering, the Internet is unavoidable.